The first thing Lena Rivers did, according to later statements from her other children, was to take Tommy home and tear the sailor suit from his body. Some weeks later Baxter Slate received a radio call to the Rivers house from a neighbor who reported that several older neighborhood children had begun hanging around the Rivers home and that some behaved as though they had been drinking. And that the new arrival, Tommy, seldom came outside and looked very sick when he did.
Baxter Slate, working alone on the daywatch at that time, had gone to the Rivers house and met Lena Rivers. She was drunk and dirty and her house was a mess. He had asked to see her youngest child and held his ground when she protested that he was taking a nap.
Finally Lena Rivers did admit Baxter Slate to the child’s room and he did in fact find the child: unwashed, fully clothed, in a crib too small for him. When Baxter later became a Juvenile officer and saw many neglected children he was to remember that Tommy Rivers’ pants looked almost as though they were pressed flat on the bed but he did not realize at the time that starving children can often be distinguished from very thin children by the absence of buttocks.
But at that time Baxter Slate knew very little about starving children, never having been in war like some of the other choirboys. So he had retreated when Mrs. Rivers ordered him out of her house. Baxter had often retreated, especially when working alone, if he felt he was on shaky constitutional grounds. Baxter Slate had always believed implicitly in limited police power, due process, the jury system. And even now though his years on the street had eroded his beliefs he still insisted on not overstepping his authority. This caused many partners to say, “Baxter’s a good partner to work with, goes along with most anything you want to do, but he’s so naïve I think he was brought up in a bottle.”
The Wilburn Military Academy was not exactly a bottle, but it was a hothouse for upper middle class children, which Baxter was until his mother foolishly lost her fat alimony check by impetuously marrying an alarm clock manufacturer who lost most of his money by diversifying into offshore oil drilling. Then the years at the authoritarian Dominican boarding school taught the boy what pansies the teachers at Wilburn were as they played at being soldiers. God’s army had much more dedicated generals. It was surprising that a boy who had been cuffed around and dealt with so strictly and splendidly educated in the traditional sense-virtually without parents unless one counted holidays and summers with Mom-would be the kind of policeman who would worry about human rights and due process. After all, they had always been denied him. But he did worry about such things. Fiercely. Even after he concluded that he had been a fool to entertain such notions.
Once, Baxter Slate, working alone in the West Adams district, saw a car driving by with two young white children waving frantically from the rear window and then dropping out of sight on the seat. The driver was a black man in a stingy brim hat. Baxter followed the car two miles for another glimpse of the white children, asking himself if he would be doing this had the driver been white, wondering if it were just a children’s prank. Finally, Baxter turned on his red lights and stopped the car. The white children were crouched down on the seat in the rear, giggling. The man, a boyfriend of the children’s mother, asked angrily, “Would you have stopped me if those kids had been black?” And Baxter Slate lied and said he would, but he never forgot.
Two weeks before Tommy Rivers died Baxter Slate received the second radio call to the Rivers home. This one from a neighbor on the other side of the street who reported that there was definitely something wrong. Tommy had come to live with his mother nine months before but had been seen only occasionally as he sat with a brother or sister in the front yard.
“I believe he’s a sick boy” the woman had said to Baxter Slate when he responded to the radio call.
And this time Baxter Slate did overstep his authority a bit in demanding to see Tommy Rivers and scaring Lena Rivers with an implied threat to call in Juvenile officers if she refused.
Lena Rivers finally consented, and the gaunt young woman with bright darting eyes went to the bedroom and returned with a dirty but obviously fat and healthy child of seven who smiled at the policeman and asked to touch his gun.
“Satisfied?” Lena Rivers said. “Meddling neighbors oughtta mind their own business.”
Baxter Slate looked at Lena Rivers, at her scraggly colorless ponytail and dark rimmed blinking eyes, at the face already starting to bloat from alcohol despite her skinny build and relative youthfulness.
“That little boy looks different from when I saw him last,” said Baxter.
“When did you see him?” the woman slurred as Baxter smelled the booze.
“I was called here once before,” Baxter said, still standing in the doorway. “I was the one you let into the bedroom to look at Tommy, remember?”
“Oh yeah. You’re gonna spend your career hassling me, is that it?”
“No, I guess not,” Baxter said.
Every skill he had picked up during his four years as a policeman told him that this woman was lying. As with most policemen the hardest thing to learn was what consummate liars people are, and it was even more difficult for Baxter because he had been brought up to believe there is such a thing as unvarnished truth and that most people speak it.
“Is that the same boy I saw before?” Baxter asked and he believed it was a lie when she said, “Of course it is!”
“What’s your name, son?” Baxter asked, stooping and smiling at the child.
“Tommy Rivers,” the boy said and looked up at his mother.
“I don’t believe that’s the same child I saw. He was thin, very very thin.”
“So he’s gained a few pounds. He was sick. Did my nosy neighbor tell you he was sick?”
And Baxter Slate nodded because the neighbor had said that, and yet…
“Look,” Baxter said, trying his broad, winning smile on Lena Rivers, “this is my second call here. Tell you what, I’ll just come in for a look around and then everybody’ll be satisfied and you won’t see me again. Okay?”
And then the woman stepped out on the porch in the sunlight and Baxter was no longer looking at her through the screen door and could see the yellow pouches around her sparkling demented eyes.
“You been cooperated with all you’re gonna be. You got no right here and I want you outta my face and off my property So I don’t keep a spic and span house, so what? My kids’re cared for and here’s the one you’re so goddamn worried about. Now tell that bitch she got any more complaints I’ll go over there and kick her ass all over the neighborhood!”
Lena Rivers went inside and slammed the door, leaving Baxter Slate standing indecisively on the front porch.
For months after that Baxter wondered how much of his hesitancy would be attributed to his boarding school politeness and whether perhaps the more obtrusive working class produced the best cops after all, that perhaps police departments were foolish to recruit from any other social group.
But no matter how many times he postulated a hypothetical situation to other policemen, never daring to admit to them he had contact with Tommy Rivers, he had to come to the inescapable conclusion that very few would have stood on that porch. As tentative as Hamlet. Only to wipe sweat from his hat brim and drive away to another call.
The answers to his hypothetical question varied slightly:
“I think I’d have called for a backup unit and maybe a supervisor or Juvenile officer and gone on in. I mean if I really suspected she had switched kids on me.” That from Father Willie Wright.
“I’da walked over the cunt and looked for the little whelp.” That from Roscoe Rules.
Not one of the choirboys, and he asked each privately, had suggested that he would consider that there was not enough probable cause to enter the woman’s home or cause her further discomfiture. Most agreed with Francis Tanaguchi who shrugged and said, “I don’t worry about it when a little kid’s safety’s at stake. If the court wants to kick the case out, groovy, but I’ll see that the kid’s okay.”